Screen Circuits: Fear and Paranoia in the Sprawl (circa 1995)

Abstract

Fig. 1: Smith Street Sprawl (circa 1995), Mitch Goodwin, 2018The nineties were more of a feeling than a knowing and Gen X felt the kinetic edges of cyberculture most keenly. The millennium was in approach as the planet groaned and the network readied itself for a reboot. We were becoming the 21st century whether we liked it or not.Yep, I was there in the nineties, with a rag-tag bunch of University peers supposedly studying Brecht and Chekov, writing like Camus and Garner and thinking like Lacan and Kristeva. Instinctively, we were suspicious of them all. We were instead seduced by the boldness of network culture, by the back-and-forth of data flows, the trade in fixes and patches and versio..